Sunday, 6 September 2015

I suppose that the whole thing that
kicked it all off was one picture, the photo of three-year-old Aylan, or Alan,
washed up on a beach in Turkey after drowning, with his brother and mother in
the Mediterranean. Some having been talking about this for months!

Suddenly, the world has wakened up to
the fact that we have a massive refugee crisis, as big, if not bigger than that
at the end of World War 11.

You will note that I use the word
“refugee”, and not migrant or scum or freeloader or swarm, but refugee, in the same way as Joseph, Mary
and the Baby Jesus were when they fled to Egypt from King Herod.

I have come across a number of things
written this week, some of which has angered me, some of which has caused me to
shed tears, but one poem, written by a Somali refugee, a young woman, moved me
to tears. Syrians don’t have time to write poetry at the moment, and I decided
to use this instead today and share it with you.

"Home" Somali poet Warsan
Shire

no
one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

To give balance, a “friend” of mine and
some of you know who, wrote this in social media:

I think that all of us ex-servicemen should
collect our little pensions together and buy up the old HMS Hermes. Put our
families aboard and sail her over to Syria, where there is a hell of a lot more
room and no immigrants to bother us. Use that land to build a new England
because it seems that this so-called government wants to give all our
hard-earned money and health organisation away to everyone except our own
people. Want to join me?

I felt
tempted to offer him his fare.

Firstly,
it’s not an “either or”. The poor and marginalised already in this great
country of ours need to be looked after and austerity is not working and is
making them poorer by the day.

Then we
come to the stranger, the refugee!

The Old
Testament is full of the importance of welcoming the stranger. The Hebrew Bible
remembers well the exodus of a whole nation fleeing Egypt on a journey to a
Promised Land. The Lord told the people of Israel that they were never to
forget that they were once in the same predicament. Read again the first
reading today from Proverbs. It talks of sharing our bread with the poor, and
the stranger at the gate.

In the
Epistle today, James has some straight talking.. about loving your neighbour
and tending to their needs. We need to print that out and put it on our
noticeboard!

The
Gospels are full of the same sort of material. We know all about feeding the
hungry, clothing the naked and all the rest, because Matthew 25 tells us to. What
would Jesus do? What would Jesus say? What is Jesus saying? The
Syrophonician woman today, treated as scum, is granted the crumbs from the
table, and more than crumbs! The disciples in Acts sold their possessions to
have a common fund to help the poor and share with those in need.

And yet
in today’s papers (Telegraph) I caught a glimpse of governments intention to
take 15.000, and start bombing Syria in four weeks time. Not in my name!!

There is
only one Christian response to this refugee crisis, and that is to take as many
as possible. Anyone who thinks differently should go back home and read their Bible.

Before
the General Election, our Prime Minister told us that we were a Christian
nation. I wondered.

However,
if we do not meet our obligations, and refuse to take our fair share of human
beings, yes, human beings, then I’m afraid that we can no longer pretend to be a Christian country, but
one of greed and self-interest.

About Me

Just a wee Episcopalian priest in the two best parishes in the West of Scotland. An avid, depressed Partick Thistle Nil Fan, and a Procrastinator of Distinction, with two dogs, two cats and a Rectory Wife, (The RW), I post bits for everyone, or sometimes nobody at all except me!